Working in China demands constant innovation, adjustment

Xiamen in September is humid, the kind of muggy that sticks to your shirt before noon. But the exhibition center by the water was a gleaming air-conditioned box of glass and steel, and for four days it felt like a small city of its own — countries had set up miniature streets, booths were covered in QR codes, and pavilions glowed with LED signs.

This was the China International Fair for Investment and Trade, now in its 25th year. Held from Sept 8 to 11, the fair once again turned Xiamen, a tourist city in Fujian province, into a crossroad of global capital and ideas.

The fair has grown from a regional event in Fujian in the 1980s into one of the world's leading investment platforms. In 1997, when it became a national-level event, the exhibition space was under 30,000 square meters. Today it spans 120,000 sq m, with delegations from more than 120 countries and regions.

Over its history, some 30,000 projects have been signed here, channeling more than $400 billion into China. Those figures were impressive, but what lingered after the September fair wasn't the scale — it was the mood.

Executives I met weren't chasing quick wins. "This isn't a sprint; it's a marathon," said one senior executive from a multinational firm, adding that working in China demands stamina, including constant innovation and adjustment. It was a phrase I underlined because it came up in different ways again and again.

Chinese companies, too, were eager to share their overseas stories. A logistics entrepreneur from Xiamen told me his firm had moved from simply exporting to building full operations in Southeast Asia. "It's not 'going out', it's 'going in'," he said, a phrase that captured how globalization itself is shifting.

CIFIT has always been about numbers — 644 billion yuan ($90.5 billion) in deals were announced this year — but for many, the encounters mattered more. On my way between halls, I met Wei Yingqi, a senior at Xiamen University of Technology, volunteering for the second time. She described the thrill of new tech displays: "There was a helicopter model in one pavilion, maybe even a drone. You could walk right up to it and imagine being in the sky. Every year, there's something new to discover."

The aircraft she referred to was part of this year's showcase of the low-altitude economy, a hot topic at the fair. Using a hybrid wing design, the two-metric-ton machine can take off vertically, cruise horizontally at 200 kilometers per hour, and carry five passengers. Alongside drones and flying cars, it symbolized how CIFIT has become a stage for emerging industries.

The United Kingdom was Guest Country of Honor this year, sending its largest-ever delegation. At a crowded event in the UK Pavilion, Matt Jackson, principal and head of UK-China business at KPMG, remarked how often he was "blown away by the innovations in China", and most of all, by how young the teams were behind those breakthroughs.

By the closing ceremony, the applause for the contract figures felt almost routine. What lingered instead was a quieter sense — that openness here isn't a slogan, but a way of doing business.

As Zhou Mi, a senior research fellow at the Chinese Academy of International Trade and Economic Cooperation, put it, platforms like CIFIT are valuable because they give governments and companies "a chance to exchange views, build trust, and shape policies that make investment more predictable". That kind of stability, he said, is essential at a time of global uncertainty and rising protectionism.